Insight
Startups building products to solve small, rare problems never succeed
“The next piece I would say to people is like, you have to find, you know, be really wary of solving a small, rare problem. You can solve a big problem. You can solve a rare problem. Sorry, you can solve a small problem, fine. A rare problem, fine. But small an…”
Insight
Template-based grading encourages computer science students to memorize without understanding
“The way, and this is true worldwide, I think, the way, like, people in universities would mark a piece of code is they say, all right, we'll give them three points if they have a for loop, and two points if they have an if statement, and people just learned th…”
Insight
Engineering-driven paid search rarely works as a deterministic growth engine
“The engineer's approach to marketing is, like, We're going to hire a marketer, and they're going to find the keywords that are CAC LTV positive. That is, the customer acquisition cost is less than the LTV, and we're going to dump all of our fifty million dolla…”
Insight
Effective content marketing helps users solve broad problems before pitching
“The advice I'd give people is usually like, think about who your actual end target user is and think of all the problems in their life that you can help them with. And then try and help them as much as you can. And then every now and then hopefully you're, if …”
Insight
Marketing organization structures lack standard playbooks and vary across companies
“I've talked to maybe 50 different VPs of marketing at this point about how their marketing org is structured, and they're all different. Like, very, like, not just different as an, ooh, you put one person in, but like, substantively different. Like, even like,…”
Insight
Relying strictly on attributable marketing causes overall growth to suffer
“In general, the marketing world is one where you move from like, This is really hard to attribute, and it costs a lot of money down to, like, hey, we spent seven cent and it kicked ass, right? But that whole thing is a spectrum, and you have to be willing to d…”
Insight
Product, marketing, code, and design are renderings of one core idea
“Product and marketing and code and design are all like, they're all renderings of the same core idea.”
Insight
Startups must build what they sell and sell what they build
“Karen Peacock, who's our CEO, she always says, build what you sell, sell what you build. If you're not doing both of those things, you're in Fucking trouble, basically, right?”
Insight
Hiring one misaligned manager creates entire misaligned departments
“If you hire one person who's not on the same page, and you let them hire people, they're gonna hire more people who aren't on the same page. And next thing, you have whole wings of the company working against you in bad ways.”
Insight
Founders without marketing expertise are easily duped by smooth-talking candidates
“Marketers and salespeople are good at marketing to you and selling to you. So if you've never hired a salesperson before, don't be shocked if the first person that comes to you sells you on the role, you know?”
Insight
High-touch founder onboarding requires charging more than nine dollars a month
“If you're going to spend 30 minutes talking to every single customer who needs to install, and you've no bigger picture as to how you're not going to be necessary, you need to be charging more than nine dollars a month.”
Insight
Specific brand names limit expansion; ambiguous brand names hurt conversion
“It's hard to expand a brand that has a high degree of specificity. It's hard to convert a brand that has a high degree of ambiguity.”
Opinion
Global soccer broadcasting piracy matches pre-iTunes music industry levels
“Piracy in soccer is, I would say, at, like, the levels pre-iTunes, if you remember, in the music industry, right? Like, there are, like, there is an equivalent of Kazaz. There are many of them. And no one's doing anything to solve it.”
Insight
Founders avoid massive fintech simplification opportunities due to operational schlep work
“I think that model, and I'm not saying chatbots aren't the thing here so much as drastic simplification is the thing. The Q and A maybe suggests that a chatbot might be like charming as a way to do it, or like at least unique from a brand perspective. But I th…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Intercom's blog is the company's dominant source of inbound traffic
“And it's one of our, you know, it is our dominant traffic source, but we, you know, that wasn't true for the first 100 posts.”
Insight
Companies cannot sell a solution until customers have bought the problem
“You can't sell somebody on the solution until they've bought the problem.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Tailoring website onboarding by persona doubled or tripled Intercom's conversion rate
“Over the years of experimentation, we've really doubled or trebled our actual conversion rate through things like that.”
Assertion Supported
Des Traynor wrote roughly 93 of Intercom's first 100 blog posts
“I wrote, I think I wrote 93 of the first 100 posts.”
Des Traynor